Dealing with Disappointment

Things don’t always work out the way we’d hoped. It’s part of life. We’re all dealing with disappointments. If we do creative work, disappointment comes with the turf. Early in my professional career, I learned one way to deal this. I was intent on getting articles into professional journals – social work and mental health – when one was rejected by Hospital & Community Psychiatry. This wasn’t an everyday, polite rejection. It came with blind-reviewer comments, one of whom assured me that “I had a lot of nerve submitting such a piece of garbage.” I’m happy to report that I didn’t sink into disappointment, wasting energy raging. I fell back on advice I’d received from mentors: You can’t account for editorial tastes. Keep a manuscript circulating until it finds a home. I made one change – added a footnote to an article which my blind reviewer insisted could only be omitted by a moron – and sent it off to the Community Mental Health Journal. I was informed by that editor that they rarely accepted articles for publication without significant revisions, but this one they would publish as is.

For forty years, I’ve been sharing that lesson. You’d think I’d learned it. Some lessons I find myself repeating. I have to smile. Taking my post-retirement dive into fiction writing, I slammed into disappointment. I sent my first novel to ten agents, and no one was interested. Only one bothered to respond. Clearly, my first ten pages, maybe thirty – I sent what they asked for on their websites – didn’t grab them. As much as I loved my story, no one who didn’t know me was reading on to see where Ken was heading. I was going to what I was sure, still feel certain, is pretty cool place, but there was no hint in the first hundred pages. Licking my wounds, I shared my disappointment with with Ed, my filmmaker friend, who suggested introducing a teaser. I rewrote the novel, getting my “Beware the Ideas of March” into the second chapter. This, I hoped, would grab attention and sent it out to ten more agents.

The silence is again deafening, and I’ve remembered another way to deal with disappointment, another lesson learned. When a charter school proposal was approved by the state, we celebrated, but we’d learned nothing. It was when a proposal was rejected, although we were disappointed, that we had the opportunity to learn. What would it take to meet the reviewer objections while remaining true to our mission? Our charter applications got better, and our schools were better because of what we learned in the rewriting process. Instead of ignoring rejections and pushing forward, learn. It’s the unexpected which triggers growth. I’m giving it a few more weeks for the if-you-haven’t-heard-from-me-in-three-months-assume-I’m-not-interested to expire, but I’m looking forward to trying another rewrite. Forget the teaser. I have an idea on how to get right into the story.

What are saying, Ken? When disappointment arrives, should I gassho in gratitude, “Thank you for the teaching”?  Isn’t there a way to escape disappointment? Let that question percolate. We’ll come back to it in a week.